Competitiveness of FM

[Member12345679]

Did anyone find family med to be extremely competitive this year? I applied for both IM and family, with family as my backup. But surprisingly I had more interviews for IM than I did for family. Just wondering if anybody else noticed that too.

[StepTaker]

I think Family Medicine is getting more competitive year after year, specially with more focus on primary care nowadays.

However, I still think Internal Medicine is still more competitive, specially because of the more fellowship options.

Perhaps your profile was more geared toward Internal Medicine and that's why you got more IM interviews.

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[DocGuilo]

Alot of people I know didn't get FM interviews because they only had IM LoRs.
You NEED 1 LoR in FM to apply to the FM programs or they know your doing it as a backup

[patelMD]

I'd agree that its getting more competitive. But then again, hasn't it always been?

FM has had quite the selective criteria in terms of everything besides scores (which is becoming more apparent now because I've seen programs asking for a minimum score of median, no fails etc.), this means USCE, LORs, etc.

My crystal ball tells me they're making it catered for Carib grads that fulfill requirements quite substantially majority of the time.

[@usmlethree]

Originally Posted by Member12345679

Did anyone find family med to be extremely competitive this year? I applied for both IM and family, with family as my backup. But surprisingly I had more interviews for IM than I did for family. Just wondering if anybody else noticed that too.

This is the experience that many candidate have reported in the past couple of years. I think that the reason is that everybody (peds, surg, path, rad) use FM as back up. Don' get me wrong, I think that FM is really the speciality of the future. But as it seems, everybody applies "just in case" it becomes really competitive, just like the "malignant IMG community" programs, for the same reason everybody applies there. So you never know, you may have a better chance in Path than in FM, the average Path IMG program for 5 ish positions receives aprox. 400 ish application, the FM IMG program in the same Hospital for 10 positions receives 1000 to 2000 ish application.

So it is all relative, the best way to do it is work hard, chase your goals and stay focus.

I hope it was helpful, GL